After rejoicing that the BBC had improved its ‘Young Musician of the Year’ coverage so markedly in 2010, I had to grind my teeth with annoyance as I watched the ‘Eurovision Young Musicians 2010’ competition on BBC4 this evening. The young musicians were tremendous, but the presentation was horribly bland. Fifteen semi-finalists were whittled down to seven finalists in the blink of an eye. I was disappointed and puzzled that the UK’s representative, 14-year-old trombonist Peter Moore, wasn’t a finalist. I think he’s very special.

The setting for the final was, inexplicably, an outdoor ‘performance shell’ in Vienna’s Rathausplatz. The seven finalists were allowed 7 minutes each (at least, this is all we heard on TV), and each devoted their 7 minutes to a fast concerto movement. Because the city square is so huge, the performances were amplified. But the sound coverage was inadequate; we saw the performers in close-up, but their sound seemed small and distant. It was clear that conductor and orchestra couldn’t hear the soloists properly either – at any rate, this was the kindest explanation for all the lapses in co-ordination. And for some extraordinary reason, the young Russian pianist had to play with the piano on the conductor’s right, with the piano lid removed and the piano facing the other way from usual, so that the pianist’s left hand was closest to the audience. It must have been very disconcerting for him.

Perhaps the open-air presentation, similar to that of the ‘Proms in the Park’, was designed to do away with the supposed stuffiness of the traditional concert hall. But they were in Vienna, whose concert halls are a joy to behold. What a waste of an opportunity for these fine young players to perform in the Musikverein or the Konzerthaus! I can’t deny that the thousands-strong audience outside in the Rathausplatz cheered everyone warmly. But their applause seemed identical for each performance. Who could blame them? With such poor sound coverage and such brief glimpses of each player, it was impossible to judge between them. And how much could the judges hear? At the end, I felt strangely uninvolved in the results – an unusual feeling for me. In fact, the winner was a delightful young flautist, Eva-Nina Kozmus from Slovenia. I look forward to hearing her and the other young musicians in better circumstances.

I was in Provence in the south of France last week and visited the Abbey of Silvacane, founded by the Cistercians in the late 12th century but long since abandoned. I thought it one of the loveliest churches I’ve seen. The  church, cloister, garden, chapter house, refectory, dormitory, scriptorium and so on presented one delightful prospect after another. Light poured in, making the honey-coloured stone even more radiant.

The guidebook said, ‘The architecture style was both functional and devoid of all ornament, such as sculpture, stained glass or illuminated work that might distract the monks from prayer …Like the layout, the architecture is simple and stark. It was not designed to please and its simplicity makes no concessions. Its beauty results from the vigour of the proportions alone, from the harmony of forms, from the perfection of its stonework and the way light falls through the rare openings.’

I was very surprised to read the phrase, ‘it was not designed to please’. To me, nothing could have been more deeply pleasing to look at. Its pure lines, shapes and spaces and the way they related to one another seemed masterly and illuminating, as though the building was carrying on the work of the monks all by itself.

I didn’t manage to catch many of the programmes charting the progress of BBC Young Musician of the Year 2010, but I’m proud to say that I did pick out the eventual winner, 16-year-old pianist Lara Omeroglu, when she first appeared in a keyboard category final. Not that it was really difficult to do. She seems to have every quality one hopes for in a young performer, or indeed in a performer of any age: intellectual strength, insight, stamina, naturalness, grace and humour. Last night she was the crowning glory of a final in which three exceptional young musicians played concertos with the BBC National Orchestra of Wales. Callum Smart, aged just 14, played the Mendelssohn violin concerto, Emma Halnan played Reinecke’s flute concerto and Lara Omeroglu performed Saint-Saens’ G minor piano concerto. In all three cases I had to pinch myself to remember how young they really are and how astounding is their level of accomplishment. They were all so composed and technically assured, yet modest too. It’s a tribute to the specialist music schools (the Purcell School near London and Chetham’s School in Manchester) they attend. These schools now regularly produce such well-trained and well-prepared young musicians, often mature beyond their years.

Two years ago when the previous BBC Young Musician competition took place, there was a lot of complaint (including from me) about how the proceedings were relayed on television. We heard barely a few bars of music before fading out to an interview showing each young musician at home, playing computer games, shopping with friends, caring for their rabbits or whatever. There seemed to be a desperate wish on the part of the producers to prove to the general public that these young achievers are ‘ordinary’ after all. This year it was much more sensitively arranged. We heard long chunks of music and had a chance to make up our own minds.

My remarks about the red daisies which bent, but did not break as the lawn mower passed by, have caused some interesting correspondence. People have pointed out that several old civilisations realised the wisdom of bending in order to avoid breaking.

A friend tells me, however, that his Latin school motto (at a boys’ school in England) took exactly the opposite point of view. ‘Frangas non flectes’, ‘you shall break, but you shall not bend [me]’ was the school’s proud boast. Perhaps there was an era of British history when this approach seemed admirable or necessary, but it doesn’t seem so now, or at least, not to me. I suppose it means that standing up for a principle is a fine goal, and of course it is. But it seems very sad to try and train young minds in the belief that being flexible is a weakness rather than a strength. Or is this a man-woman thing?

Listening to a jazz radio station as we made dinner, I was surprised to hear the announcer describe every track as ‘a song’, even though the programme was a sequence of purely instrumental tracks. ‘What’s your next song?’ he kept saying to his guest, who’d reply without batting an eyelid, ‘My next song is a great one for saxophone, bass and drums’, or whatever.

I can only imagine that calling everything ‘a song’ is a habit provoked by iTunes, where everything seems to be labelled a song. But to me a song is sung by a singer. If there’s no singer, then it’s not a song but something else: a piece, a track, a number, a movement. That a song is something you sing seems something very ancient and basic. What next: will someone who plays ‘a song’ on the piano be called ‘a singer’?

To call an instrumental piece ‘a song’ seems almost like calling a slice of bread ‘a drink’. No doubt historians of language will say that if enough people call an instrumental piece a song, then ‘song’ will become standard usage, and soon nobody will think a thing about it. But as far as I’m concerned, we’re not there yet.